e‑Government and Technology Acceptance: The Case of the Implementation of Section 508 Guidelines for Websites

Abstract

This paper examines the relevance of the Technology Acceptance Model for e‑Government websites at federal government level in the United States through an exploratory research study. Various unfunded government mandates over the past several years have required agencies to create websites, put services on the sites, and make them accessible to citizens, and the federal e‑Government now includes tens of thousands of sites. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, for example, was passed to ensure e‑Government sites would be accessible to persons with disabilities. By studying the implementation of the requirements of Section 508 through a number of data collection techniques and in terms of the Technology Acceptance Model, this paper seeks to use this particular law as an example through which to better understand the processes by which government agencies adopt e‑Government requirements and the actions that government managers can take to improve the implementation of such adoption.